


Boléro

by claritylore



Category: House M.D.
Genre: F/M, First Time, Hurt James Wilson (House M.D.), Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Major Illness, Sick James Wilson (House M.D.), Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-28
Updated: 2020-03-28
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:54:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23366533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/claritylore/pseuds/claritylore
Summary: When Wilson shows up at House's place in the middle of the night with a concussion, it's only the start of some very strange behaviour. Is something bigger going on with Wilson or is House just being paranoid?
Relationships: Greg House/James Wilson, Greg House/James Wilson/Original Female Character(s), past James Wilson/Amber Volakis
Comments: 7
Kudos: 77





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A fanfic written in 2009, rescued from LJ and reposted here for posterity. Set after Season 5 episode “Joy”. Ignores later canon.

Somewhere in the misty land of half-sleeping, half-waking, House heard the key jiggling in the lock of his door. Loudly and with stuttering haste it rang out. But it was only the most peripheral part of his brain which took note of it; the rest of him was very resolutely staying unaware. Sleep was comfortable.

Even when that part of his brain told him that the lock had been turned and someone was entering his apartment, he didn’t wake up so much as groan and turn over.

The front door was closed, delicately, and footsteps crossed the floor. All was quiet.

Until something was smashed, creating a noise loud enough to jerk House to full consciousness.

His first instinct was to ignore it and go back to sleep but another loud thump of something crashing to the floor made that impossible. House’s hand went straight for his cane and he groaned with the effort of moving his still-inert body.

The clock on his bedside table read 02:23am. Nobody should be in his apartment except for him, and possibly a hooker if the previous evening had gone that way. Which it hadn’t.

House made it out of bed with the sternest of expressions, his cane acting both as crutch and potential weapon, even if he got the feeling that he wasn’t about to confront anything so spectacular as a burglar. Sprung tight as a coil, he crept to his bedroom door, still half ajar, and peered out into the living room.

He could see the intruder near the front door, attempting to pick up a toppled side table and rearranging the books that had been on it. The shape of the figure was familiar, even in the poor lighting coming through his windows from the streetlamps outside. House breathed a small sigh of relief.

He went for the lightswitch and in a flash both he and his unscheduled visitor were blinded. House blinked a few times and, sure enough, his vision cleared to the sight of Wilson fumbling with his book stand.

‘Oh what the hell are you doing here?’ he barked. ‘It’s three o’clock in the damned morning.’

Wilson slowly lowered his hand from over his eyes, in defence of the light, and squinted at House. He swayed a little and then stumbled towards him.

‘If you want to take the couch, you know where the blankets are,’ House growled, fully intent on going right back to bed.

‘House…’ Wilson mumbled and knocked over a lamp with his hand. The action caused him to jump and sway away, barely able to keep on his feet.

‘You drunk?’ he asked and frowned. ‘You look like crap.’

He really did, House noticed; he looked pale as paper and about half as sturdy.

‘No. I… don’t’ know.’ Wilson stopped and pressed a hand to the back of his neck, compulsively, causing House’s eye to fall on the dark smears around his neck.

‘Are you… are you bleeding?’ House muttered, warily stepping closer.

Wilson looked at his hand and seemed as surprised as anyone to discover it was covered in dried blood. He looked even more dismayed when he surveyed his other hand and found more. ‘Not sure. Maybe.’

House sighed, heavily and held him still while he circled around him, making it very clear that he was immensely put out by having to look him over, if only to mask the flutter of concern that passed through his stomach. On closer examination, he saw that Wilson had a fair cut on the back of his head, deep enough to have flayed some of the skin. ‘You’re going to need a stitch in that but I think it’s more or less stopped bleeding,’ he told him and paid no attention to Wilson’s flinch when he poked the wound and probed for signs of any abnormal swelling. ‘How d’you do it?’

‘Do what?’

‘The can-can,’ he snarked, aware of the fact that it was a lame come-back but too sleepy to care. ‘How did you crack your head open?’

‘Um… I don’t remember.’ He paused and then turned around to him, frowning. ‘House, why am I in your apartment?’

House rolled his eyes. ‘Concussion. Great. You had to come bother me with it in the middle of the night. Couldn’t just check yourself in? Wasn’t that the obvious thing to do?’

Wilson just stared at him, blankly. No snappy come-back or comical eyebrow was returned to turn his being a bastard in a witty exchange. Concussion seemed more and more likely.

‘Okay okay, sit down before you pass out. I’ll go put on some shoes and we’ll head back to work.’

He turned his back for less than a minute before a heavy thud alerted him to the fact that the man who had been standing in his living room was now lying down in it, rather than be seated before said occurrence occurred, as he had been told.

‘Crap.’ He turned back and went to check his vitals, realising immediately that the fall had almost certainly exacerbated the head injury. ‘It’s never simple with you, is it?’

He grabbed his phone and called the direct line to the ambulance crew, barking an order to get to his place like a bat out of hell on amphetamines or face the consequences. House took a certain pride in the fear he instilled in his fellow man since it did tend to come with certain perks, quick agreement to medical assistance included.

House grabbed the pants and socks he’d discarded on the floor the previous day and wriggled into them. Then he grabbed his sneakers and went back to check on Wilson.

‘Nghgh…’ Wilson groaned, eyelids fluttering.

For once, House couldn’t prevent the relief from showing through in his face. If he hadn’t knocked himself out enough to stay out cold, that had to be a good sign. He grabbed a cushion from his chair and sank, a little painfully, down to the floor beside his friend.

‘You owe me a new cushion cover,’ he grumbled before carefully placing it under Wilson’s head. It became immediately apparent that his head wound was bleeding again now and that did concern him. He had no idea how much blood he’d already lost but suspected it might have been a fair amount, judging by the pallor of his hands.

‘M’sorry.’

‘Forget it. I didn’t like the color anyway.’

Wilson smiled, warmly, and House had to carefully school his face not to return the expression. Sappy didn’t suit him nearly so well.

Another flutter of the eyeballs upwards had him checking Wilson’s pulse again. It seemed a little weak to him. House checked his watch and tutted, even though he’d only called the ambulance a minute ago. He pushed himself back onto his feet with an almighty grunt and went to retrieve his first aid kit from the bathroom. Finding a large pad and rolls of bandage and tape, he returned to do a hatchet job on Wilson’s head.

House carefully lowered himself down to the floor, taking care not aggravate his leg, and lifted Wilson up at the shoulder. He was relieved when Wilson helped to sit himself up, although the way he naturally folded himself against House’s right shoulder and chest, one hand reaching up to hold onto his bicep and his chin settling down comfortably in the indentation of his shoulder, was a bit of a hindrance.

Frowning again, though he wasn’t sure why, House took the pad in the palm of his hand and then pressed it against the back of Wilson’s head over the wound. He held it in place, allowing Wilson to keep his chin rested on him for the moment, while he expertly separated the roll of bandage with his remaining left hand. Then he let Wilson’s head fall back a little into his line of view, and started wrapping around. Finally, with a few strips of tape attached to keep everything in place, he was done. Triage at its best.

Wilson smiled at him again, still clinging on to his bicep. ‘House,’ he sighed, quite happily. ‘Knew I could count on you.’

‘Don’t make a sc…’ he began, and was surprised to be cut off by a meeting of lips; his own, and Wilson’s. Together. In the same place.

He almost immediately snapped his head back, eyes half bulging out of their sockets. ‘What are you d…?’

But Wilson was on him again and this time he had a better grip. House felt a strange surge of emotions; anger first, then annoyance, mixed with a unbidden tingle up and down his spine and topped off with the feeling that tectonic plates were spinning somewhere beneath them. The kiss was so overwhelming, so urgent, he found himself going along with it for a good few seconds before trying to pull away.

When they parted, the first thing he saw were how much more rosier Wilson’s lips looked now. His friend gave him an awkward sort-of-proud-yet-a-little-shy grin, like a blushing girl guide kissing her boy scout sweetheart for the first time, and rested his forehead against House’s shoulder, cheek muscles tightening with his growing smile.

It took a good thirty seconds for the thudding of House’s heart to diminish enough for House to realise that Wilson was no longer smiling; he had passed out in his arms.

House stared off towards his front door for a good few moments, still overwhelmed with surprise, his every braincell set to work on provide rationales. Then he carefully laid Wilson back down on the floor, his head on the pillow, and backed away.

Fortunately, there was no real effort involved in rationalising it away; if Wilson was concussed enough to not know how he managed to find his way to House’s apartment, then what was a kiss between best friends? Nothing.

That settled in his mind, he got on with the process of letting the paramedics into his apartment and stepped back as they hoisted Wilson onto a gurney and rolled him away. By the time he’d slid into the ambulance beside him, the small matter of the kiss was almost forgotten. By the time they’d reached the hospital, it might as well have not happened.

\---

Wilson was, apparently, going to be just fine. As House had surmised, all damage was superficial and the disorientation appeared to have been part concussion, part blood loss. He’d nicked a large enough vein to have prevented it from coagulating quickly but he had never been in any danger, aside from the scenario whereby the confusion had put him in the path of a moving vehicle or had sent him over the edge of a cliff.

Nobody was too concerned, so House wasn’t either. Mostly.

Then, almost all thought of Wilson vanished with the admittance of what had appeared to be a new mystery case - a janitor at the hospital with sudden anaphylaxis, and no obvious cause, plus polyuria and a few broken bones from crashing his car during the attack which had had him admitted. However a search of the mangled car turned up diuretic drugs and a few routine tests showed that an ability to process them had caused a build up and then an allergic reaction. All explicable. All boring. House was visiting Wilson and harassing him before it was even afternoon.

He found him already on his feet, hair sticking out of his head bandage at every break in the wrapping, and fussing over getting back to work. With relatively little teasing it out of him, House discovered that the events of the previous evening had been a complete blur and finding himself at the hospital was rather a shock.

House filled in the bits he knew - leaving one minor detail that _didn’t happen_ out – verbally billed him for his ruined cushion cover and went to watch TV in a secluded private room for the rest of the day, before signing out at the late hour of 4pm. He could tell Wilson was fine and he didn’t want to draw out the awkwardness by hanging around him after work.

\---

Somewhere in the misty land of half-sleeping, half-waking, House heard the key jiggling in the lock of his door. Loudly and with stuttering haste it rang out. But it was only the most peripheral part of his brain which took note of it; the rest of him was very resolutely staying unaware. Sleep was comfortable.

Even when that part of his brain told him that the lock had been turned and someone was entering his apartment, he didn’t wake up so much as groan and turn over.

The front door was closed, delicately, and footsteps crossed the floor. After a pause, the door was opened again and relocked. All was quiet…

This time House went back to sleep.

\---

When he arrived in for work the next morning, House was surprised to find that his team had sussed out what had torn that nice hole in the back of Wilson’s head, even if the man himself had misplaced that information.

It turned out that their friend, the car-crashing janitor, had been the culprit in Wilson’s case. For some reason best known to him, Kutner had incorporated the CCTV footage from the inside parking lot where the crash occurred into his evening viewing schedule and made a discovery.

On replay, they all watched as the janitor backed out of his space, straightened his car out and then drove shakily straight for a man in a suit walking across the lot. The blurry image of Wilson had looked up from whatever file he had been reading and thrown himself backwards to escape the car, landing back on the corner of a concrete pillar in doing so. As the car smashed into two parked vehicles and came to a halt, Wilson had slowly picked himself up and wandered off in the other direction, apparently without even noticing the carnage.

The accident had taken place at around eight thirty. House had a vision of Wilson wandering around, aimlessly, all the way to his friend’s place a good eight miles away. That was odd since Wilson’s place was nearer but, hey, he had the better cushion covers and no one could deny that.

Everyone expected him to take the tape to Wilson forthwith. He didn’t actually see the point in that, so he told Taub to do it if he wanted some alone-time with Wilson that much. Eyes were rolled, wit was traded, he sent them off to find patients or go wandering the corridors and House was left alone to his cane, his ball and his thoughts.

A few minutes later, at around 11 o’clock, he saw Wilson walk down the corridor past his window, carrying a large green file under his arm. He toyed with the idea of tailing him to pass the time but his leg was really throbbing and it made pursuit impossible today. Instead, he decided to time how long it took for Cuddy to arrive and blackmail him somehow into doing those three hours he owed to clinic duty - quickstep on the double, Hail Cuddy!

Thirty-three minutes.

Or more accurately, eight hundred and twelve ball bounces.

He saw out the rest of the day with said clinic duty - not too bad for once, mostly due to the amusingly nervous student attempting to score by overacting the part of hyperactive child in an attempt to get some Aderall for his moronic junkie college roomies. Oscar worthy it was not. A battery of unnecessary tests involving motor function (‘no, like a Chicken I said… bob your head more…’) kept House amused enough to get through the dull parade of over-attentive mothers mistaking rashes for flesh-eating bacteria and the like. Then he hung around the front desk, partly reading case files to see if he couldn’t find any exotically ill patients to take under his wing, mostly waiting for Wilson to put in an appearance. An evening of Chinese food and movies beckoned.

He was particularly annoyed to discover from the attending after a good ten minutes of needless hanging around that Wilson had already gone. So instead he decided to go home and maybe order a hooker to pass the time.

\---

Somewhere in the misty land of half-sleeping, half-waking, House heard the key jiggling in the lock of his door. Loudly and with stuttering haste it rang out. But it was only the most peripheral part of his brain which took note of it; the rest of him was very resolutely staying unaware. Sleep was comfortable.

But this was becoming too familiar now. His mind wouldn’t let him rest with such a puzzle forming.

The front door was closed, delicately, and footsteps crossed the floor once again.

‘Who’s there?’ House yelled out, his voice gruff and hoarse. ‘Wilson?’

There was a pause. The floorboards seemed to indicate that whoever it was was approaching his bedroom. Then they stopped and turned around again. The front door slammed as the mystery person left his apartment.

House pulled himself up enough to see under the blinds and out of his window. The yellow glow of the streetlights burned his retinas but he found that, by squinting, he could see through the haze of night. He saw Wilson sitting on the curb by his car, his head in his hands.

Some part of him wanted to go and find out what he was doing there. But it was Wilson. Just Wilson. Explanations would be forthcoming another time. He was tired. His leg was sore.

House shuffled back under his covers and went back to sleep.

\---

House didn’t actually remember that he’d had a visitor during the night until around 11am when he saw Wilson walking past his office windows, carrying a green file. Again.

That struck him as odd but within the realms of acceptable Wilson-ness. It was worth checking out though, so House grabbed his cane and tried to catch up, only for Wilson to brush him off and run off to see a patient.

Then, to add more insult, Wilson disappeared for the afternoon and didn’t return to his office. If House didn’t know any better, he would have said that Wilson was avoiding all of their usual haunts, aka avoiding him.

House gently used the differential meeting sparked by a new case that afternoon to probe his team over whether Wilson had been spotted with any new or, indeed, old female-shaped persons around the hospital. The answer was negative. So he told his team to do every test they had suggested for the new patient, with a few more time-consuming ones added in for good measure, and sent them off on their way so he could go probe Cuddy. Like her ass, her eyes reached into every corner of the hospital…

(Oh that was good, he’d have to use that one at some point.)

Besides, he hadn’t sexually harassed her for a good four days now; that just wasn’t right. Since she’d lost out on becoming a brat-mom, and he’d somehow ended up kissing her, he knew he was expected to be doing that sort of thing more often. Or something like that. He wasn’t quite sure what Cuddy expected of him, but either way it didn’t hurt to make an effort.

‘That top makes your breasts look like two zeppelins fighting for dominance. I approve.’

Cuddy looked approximately sixty per cent more mortified than she otherwise would have had not two rich looking donor-types been sitting on the other side of her desk. They turned around to him, eyes widening.

‘House, I’m busy,’ she said through clenched teeth.

‘Oh, my! So you are.’ He gave them a little wave. ‘I didn’t realise today was squeeze-funds-from-rich-idiots day. My mistake.’

‘What did you call…?’ the man started, clearly as offended as he was surprised by this intrusion.

‘Your wife’s shoes are two sizes too small and that’s why she’s looking so constipated. The rash on your wrists is being caused by the nickel in your rather oversized cufflinks. Very simple problems with very simple solutions. I call that idiotic. But then money doesn’t buy you brains, I guess.’ He took advantage of their stunned silence to turn back to Cuddy. ‘I’ll leave you and the ferrets to get on with proceedings if you’ll just answer me one question. Who’s Wilson’s latest squeeze and where do I go to find her?’

Cuddy’s eyebrows looked like two sharp mountains and her eyes were beginning to blaze. ‘You know as well as I that he’s been alone since Amber. Remember her? The girlfriend you pretty much got killed…’

The rich couple exchanged alarmed glances.

‘Alright, then where is he?’

‘How the hell should I know?’

‘He’s avoiding me,’ House said and frowned back at her.

She rolled her eyes. ‘If Wilson doesn’t want to bask in the warm glow of your sunny disposition that’s his business. Now get out of here or I’ll call security.’

House looked aside, a little troubled. He couldn’t’ resist one last parting shot though. ‘Would it have made any difference if I had slept with you the other night?’

‘Out!’

He left Cuddy alone to salvage the situation and went to do some espionage of his own. The nurses in Oncology hated him with a burning passion, due to some proprietary instinct towards their dear James, but there was always a chance one of them might play Judas for a fast buck. A newer one, for example.

But House didn’t get an answer that day. Nobody knew where Wilson was, or at least nobody was blabbing.

The thought occurred to him that Wilson had lied about not remembering much about that night he had cracked his head open and wandered over to his place. Some odd mental block had stopped him from contemplating that possibility before but now it seemed painfully likely. So Wilson remembered slipping him the tongue and was probably in the throes of some ridiculous midlife crisis over it, complete with stupid ill-judged night-time visits to “talk” about it, complete with the chickening out phase.

Damned selfish. If anyone should be freaking out, it should have been him; he had been an innocent bystander to that night’s strangeness.

Whatever the reason he didn’t see Wilson yet again that day. And again he saw out the evening in solitude.

\---

House woke up at twenty past two in the morning and found himself listening. for his front door to open. He was even ready to spring out of bed and take Wilson hostage this time.

But Wilson didn’t come. And House was actually kind of disappointed.

\---

The next day, House finally caught sight of Wilson in the cafeteria and felt a triumphant leaping sensation in his chest. At last, his friend was cornered.

House observed him for a moment, noting that the bandages around his head had been ditched and that he was eating a stupid amount of salad. He snuck up behind him, tapped him on the shoulder with his cane, and sat down opposite him when he turned his head. ‘Morning Jimmy,’ he near sing-songed, brightly, before swiping something vaguely edible from his plate.

‘It’s nearly two thirty.’

‘Is it?’ He looked at his fake watch. ‘Guess I had so much fun this morning I didn’t notice.’

‘Uh huh, Foreman said the main symptom of your new one is pica. Stool-eating pica. Nice. He mentioned that wrestling against the patient to prevent further consumption was involved. Sounded messy.’

‘Taub got the worst of it. But on the bright side, we now know what he’d look like if he painted in his bald spot and, wow, it makes no difference,’ he snorted. ‘Actually, the resulting mess looked not a million miles from what you’re eating here though. Celery _and_ pineapple bits? And what the hell is that red thing there?’

‘Pulp of something. I don’t know. The salad bar was running low. I grabbed a bit of everything they had left.’

House nodded and stole some more of it. He wasn’t even all that hungry but he wasn’t physically able to see Wilson eating and walk away from it. He always had to have some, regardless of what it was. It was a primal thing, he supposed.

‘So…’ House began.

Wilson’s eyes flittered up from the report he was reading, briefly. ‘So…?’

‘So…?’

Now Wilson pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘House, I have a headache. I’m not in the mood to play guessing games…’

‘Fine. You lied to me.’ House sat and folded his arms, waiting for those eyebrows he knew and loved so well to start wiggling in effrontery.

‘I have no idea what you mean,’ he said in a resigned tone which told House he was waiting for the punch line.

‘Your little accident. You said you didn’t remember anything about coming to my place or… any of that. You lied.’

‘Uh… no, no I didn’t. I don’t remember much about that. Ergo, no lie. Feel better now?’

‘Well then why have you been avoiding me?’

The file Wilson had half-heartedly been attempting to continue reading was closed and House was pleased to finally have his full attention. ‘What makes you think I’ve been avoiding you?’

‘Do I really have to read you my list? It’s quite long. But at the top of it is what you did that night.’ House probed the confused gaze that met his own piercing one with great attention, trying to ascertain whether Wilson did in fact remember anything.

‘What I did? I didn’t do anything except nearly ending up squashed flat by a diabetic janitor.’

‘So you don’t remember what happened when you got to my place?’

Wilson looked momentarily stunned in a way that suggested that perhaps he did know what House was talking about. ‘Uh… no. No. What happened?’

‘You know perfectly well. And although I am flattered, I have to tell you that I prefer blondes.’

His friend’s mouth was forming a perfect O-shape. ‘W… what,’ he leaned in closer, conspiratorially, aware of there being other people around him, ‘what did I do?’

House just smiled at his apparent confusion. Maybe he really didn’t remember after all. If that was the case, what better way to leave him hanging and more inclined to come visit him?

‘Was it something embarrassing? What? House, what was it?’

He took one more thing from Wilson’s plate and then stood up to leave. ‘Ooops, gotta go. My team will be panicking by now without my supervision. They always do that.’

‘House…’ Wilson began before sighing and resigning himself to the fact that he wasn’t going to be told what his supposed indiscretion might possibly have been.

House went all the way to the door before he realised the cucumber he’d taken from Wilson’s plate was dotted with small white flower petals, apparently fallen off the flower display set at the centre of his table.

That would teach him for stealing from the side. Next time he would go straight for the middle, coyness be damned.

As he wandered down the corridor, absently reading his pager, he found himself slowing down and coming to a complete stop as a strange thought struck him. He quickly dismissed it, however; he was treating someone with pica as a main symptom - cocrophagia of all things - that was why his mind was going there.

Of course it hadn’t been intentional on Wilson’s part to pepper his cucumber with flower petals from the table display.

House rolled his eyes at his own mind’s need to equate everything into a medical puzzle and shoved it aside to go do his job and find a diagnosis for someone who was actually sick.


	2. Chapter 2

Life slipped back into normality. No more night-time visitations and no more Wilson avoiding him. He saw him over most lunchtimes, shared coffee and some witty repartee on his balcony a few times, didn’t catch him with any giggling new nurses and didn’t tell him what the mysterious thing he’d done that night was and forgot about it when he gave up asking.

House tagged along as Wilson had his stitch out and tried his hand at conning his friend into thinking he now had a big bald spot. Wilson wasn’t that gullible but it was damned fun to try, and that was all that counted to House.

A week after Wilson’s little accident, they celebrated by eating Chinese takeout and watching the original 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still. House dozed off an hour in and woke to find his TV off, the takeout cleared away, his spare blanket draped over him and two prawn crackers placed over his eyes like goggles. Had Wilson still been around, he would have scowled and vowed revenge. As he was alone, the thought of it made him chuckle.

The following Monday, he picked up the remake version of the movie - the one with Keanu Reeves in it - and went to cajole Wilson into joining him to watch it at his place that evening. He scrambled over the wall dividing their balcony into two and tapped on Wilson’s door until attention was paid. When the woman he was talking to turned around, House pulled a terrifying grin through the glass and internally laughed as Wilson scrambled to explain and hurried out onto the balcony.

‘It’s past opening hours. Send her away or propose already,’ House demanded.

‘I missed her appointment this afternoon…’

‘Really? The kindly Dr Wilson stood up a patient?’

‘I paged my assistant to do a reschedule this morning but the message didn’t get through so…’

House quirked an eyebrow. ‘Busy elsewhere? New nurse needed showing the back corridors and storage closets?’

‘No.’ Wilson turned back to the door leading into his office. ‘Go wait for me in your office and I’ll be with you in five.’

‘Want me to roll over and beg for you too?’

‘That would be great. Hold that thought.’ The slight smile on Wilson’s face was tucked away as he slid back inside his office.

House went back over the wall and into his own office to bounce his ball.

After nearly ten minutes, House scowled into the ether and went around the room, not even bothering to knock before opening it, aggressively, to signal his displeasure. He was surprised to find the room empty.

On closer inspection, he saw a trail of vomit spots leading a trail out towards the door, staining the carpet quite horribly. He rolled his eyes and covered his nose to go sit at Wilson’s desk, planting his feet on top of the paperwork on it since he knew it would irritate his friend immensely.

He waited for Wilson to return from cleaning his sickly patient up for a few minutes in that position, but boredom compelled him away. He looked around for something to take his attention and thumbed through a few of the reports on his desk. In moving Wilson’s briefcase aside to see some of the papers half trapped under it, he managed to knock it off the desk and cursed as half of its contents spilled onto the floor.

Of course he wasn’t all that concerned if Wilson knew he was prying in his stuff - that sort of thing was par for the course in their friendship - but he decided to try and sort the briefcase out all the same.

He lifted it all up and dumped the various pens and papers back inside, only pausing when he found himself picking up medication boxes. Two boxes to be exact. Both prescribed to James Wilson by a Dr Fingringhoe. House immediately recognised the name as belonging to a doctor from Princeton General; not one he knew personally, but one he’d encountered at some point and remembered the name of. The more battered box was for Zoloft and most of the pills were gone, while the other box looked almost new and was for Halcion. Only a few pills were missing; six to be exact.

Like a puzzle piece happily sliding into place, House immediately saw it all; both pills were prescribed for sleeplessness. Both were strong kinds too. Wilson had gone to a doctor out of the way to try and hide the fact that he was having trouble sleeping from him. Judging by the number of Zolofts popped, and the date of prescription, those had been his first medication and the Halcion was a new replacement. Six pills missing; six days since Wilson had stopped visiting him in the middle of night. Coincidence?

Zoloft was, to his knowledge, in some cases associated with sleepwalking, while Halcion was generally not. He reasoned that Wilson must have woken up at House’s place and realised he was following the pattern established that night he was concussed. Then he must have changed his prescription to another, equally potent, sleeping pill.

After a moment’s thought, House slipped the Halcion into his back pocket and put the Zoloft back in place in Wilson’s briefcase. If he was right, Wilson would look for his pills before going to bed and, not finding his Halcion, just grab a Zoloft to be done with it… making it very likely that he’d come visit House in the night again. At which point, House would have the upper hand entirely and conversations on why exactly Wilson wasn’t sleeping very well would be an interesting new “thing” to talk about.

And if he actually revealed what Wilson had done that night… oh the psychoanalysis and hand wringing would be delicious. _Not boring, not boring at all._

He inwardly grinned as Wilson returned and outwardly glowered at him.

‘I’m sorry. She’s on this new medication for the nausea and she started throwing up and…’

‘So I noticed. See, this is why I don’t let patients into my office unless they have a gun or a miniskirt.’

Wilson slumped down in his chair and sighed, pinching the skin between his eyebrows as though a headache was forming.

‘So, I got hold of a bootleg of the new Keanu Reeves version of Day the Earth Stood Still and I fancy pepperoni…’

‘I can’t tonight, House. Sorry.’

An annoyed pause. ‘Can’t or won’t?’

‘I actually can’t. I’m behind on my paperwork and I said I do a recommendation for one of the juniors and forgot that it needs to be sent out tomorrow morning so I have to get that done…’

‘Boring. You’re going to need a better reason than that.’

‘Uh… no I don’t. I’m sorry but I promised. Tomorrow night?’

‘Don’t do me any favors,’ House growled and stormed out, gratified to hear Wilson calling his name weakly as he went as if he wanted to say sorry. But he was irritated that he had waited around for Wilson, in a room stinking of vomit, when he could have gone home ages ago and found something more interesting to do.

With no Wilson to keep him occupied, he ordered the pizza for himself and played some solemn songs on the piano for a few hours. Then he decided to call up some more reliable company.

He rang out for a hooker.

\---

Somewhere in the misty land of half-sleeping, half-waking, House heard the key jiggling in the lock of his door. Loudly and with stuttering haste it rang out. But it was only the most peripheral part of his brain which took note of it; the rest of him was very resolutely staying unaware. Sleep was comfortable.

Even when that part of his brain told him that the lock had been turned and someone was entering his apartment, he didn’t wake up so much as groan and turn over.

Something was wrong though; he had fallen asleep with someone in his bed, hadn’t he? Yes, he remembered he had because he’d slipped the girl an extra fifty since it was late (okay, he’d taken a while to get it up, thanks to the vicodin) and invited her to sleep over. He’d told himself that it was because he liked waking up next to someone, which was partly true, but it had also been because at the back of his mind, he thought Wilson might just put in an appearance and the thought of him wandering in to find House with a pretty young woman in his bed amused him.

But said woman was not there, although the other side of the bed was still warm. He listened and heard voices coming from the other room, too low to really understand but unmistakable. He looked over towards his door and saw light coming in around the cracks; the light was on in his front room.

Just as he was about to get up and investigate, the voices silenced and he heard footsteps coming towards his room. The door opened, opening a window of light over him, and two people tumbled through.

House was genuinely shocked. They were undressing each other, like newlyweds making their way to their honeymoon bed, clothes dropped all over the place as they kissed.

The agency he used always provided him with ones who would kiss for a few extra dollars. That was one reason he liked to use them. And this particular hooker was certainly doing her job well by the looks of it, even if House was both disturbed and outraged to find her doing it to her best friend and an intruder in his home.

‘Wilson!’ he gasped, voice a little muted with the surprise. ‘What the hell…?’

The hooker - _Cherry was it? Or Cherise?_ – leapt onto the bed and dove for House, kissing him as well and giggling against his mouth. ‘I didn’t realise this was part of the game,’ she whispered. ‘Naughty. But I’ll play.’

Wilson was still advancing, pants-free and with his tie undone but stuck on his shoulder. He crawled onto the bed and pulled off his socks.

‘Hold on, this was definitely not part of any game…!’ House spluttered.

‘Then I just wasted six hundred bucks,’ Wilson said and crawled over to them, smiling. House realised, with alarm, that he was using the exact same proud-little-girl-guide smile he had before when he’d kissed him. Wilson grabbed the girl and she squealed, happily, as he delivered little peppered kisses to her neck and down between her breasts.

‘Whoa whoa whoa,’ House spluttered and pulled himself up a little against his pillow. He yanked Wilson away from her and snapped his fingers in front of his eyes. ‘Are you awake?’

‘Of course I am,’ he grinned, and turned back to the girl. ‘And so are you, right?’

‘I am now!’ She reached over and started to unbutton his shirt, and as she did that Wilson tried to pull House’s shirt up over his chest.

House fought with him and pulled it back down. ‘Get your own hooker!’

‘I did,’ he replied, dreamily and continued to let her undress him over House.

For a moment, House stopped to wonder if he was dreaming this. It was bizarre. Wilson wasn’t like this. Okay, yes, he knew he used hookers sometimes too but he really hadn’t pegged him for the exhibitionist type.

‘Don’t be such a prude,’ Wilson told him while he flung his own shirt aside and tried to pull off House’s again. This time, he relented and let it go over his shoulders, if only to sate his curiosity about what it was Wilson actually thought was about to happen.

The hooker - _Carrie?_ \- flung back the covers and knelt over House, kissing him until he started to melt. She pulled down his boxers and made him lift up to get them off. Those were flung aside and when he looked again, he realised Wilson had also divested himself of that final item of clothing too. They were all naked now.

 _Candise_ kissed her way down his chest and took him gently into her mouth, while Wilson knelt behind her and kissed his way down her spine.

House couldn’t help but allow his eyes to slide shut and a hand to slide into her dark hair. Sleep had prevented him from popping any vicodin so he was a good three hours into a dullness of its effects, which would help. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to really do much off-schedule but what she was doing felt really nice all the same. That was, it did until he felt a second pair of lips join hers, and the bolt of shock that resulted was like his dick had turned into a lightning rod. All of a sudden, getting it up was not a consideration. It was up and about to burst.

His eyes flung open and House watched as _Carissa_ and Wilson - _Wilson!_ \- played and sucked at him together like he was the best lollipop they’d ever tried. House went a little rigid in the spine but he couldn’t bring himself to say the magic word; couldn’t tell them to stop. He was only human and it was precious few times these days he managed to do it twice in one night.

Wilson and the hooker ended their ministrations to kiss and things appeared to be about to move on to the next stage, whatever that might be.

Even when Wilson pulled out his table drawer and emptied its contents onto the side of the bed - condoms, lube, vicodin, magazines - House couldn’t say anything, as otherwise he might. His mouth appeared to be paralysed. _Unlike Wilson’s_.

As the girl continued her ministrations to him, Wilson once again kissed his way down her spine and House saw his hand moving between her legs, causing her to hitch her breath every few seconds. Then she and Wilson changed places and she moved back to use her hand on him, pulling him to full hardness, while he went down on House again.

House was utterly transfixed by the sight of Wilson sucking and licking him and felt a nerve-shredding zap of lust like he couldn’t describe when his dark eyes looked up, right into his, slightly crinkled with humor. He thought of all the women Wilson had fucked and loved, wondering if those eyes had had the same effect on them. No wonder they all tried to marry him.

Wilson broke free and smiled at him. He moved up to kiss him and House didn’t move, couldn’t move. Even as Wilson moved back and pulled House down by his hips so he would be lying more flat on the bed. Then he reached for a condom, tore it open with his teeth and rolled it onto House like it was the most natural thing in the world for him to do.

The hooker - _Cara? Damn it what was her name?_ – allowed Wilson to kiss her again and then help her over House to slid down onto him. Wilson then crawled behind her and wrapped his arms around her, head on her shoulder so he could see House, as he played puppeteer and moved her body up and down.

House stared at them both in wonder; the pale arms against her darker skin, one hand clasped against a breast, the other caressing her belly, her head tilted back while Wilson stared at him directly, a seductive little smile fixed on his features.

He thought about the sleeping pills and felt a moment of panic at the thought that Wilson really was sleep-walking through this. It wasn’t unheard of. But no, he seemed too lucid, he seemed too… it wasn’t possible. But then again, maybe it would be better if he were? Was Wilson really the type to orchestrate a threesome with another guy? His best friend even?

It did feel good though. He kept his eyes fixed on Wilson as he moved away and grabbed another condom and the lube and then let his eyes slide closed again as he felt it when Wilson slid in behind her, literally, and began to thrust as well. The air was filled with the sound of heavy breathing from all of them and the strangeness quickly passed away like morning mist. House found he didn’t mind this situation it at all, not even the way Wilson’s shins were clasped against his thighs or the way every thrust sent tremors all the way through her back into him through the thin wall of flesh between them.

He heard Wilson whisper something into her ear and her gasp and giggle. Then he pulled away and she leaned over to him, kissing him. The act slid him free of her, but Wilson’s hand replaced her on his straining penis, moving up and down with absolute confidence. Strangely enough, the pleasure he was feeling only increased.

This was better than his usual dull fucks with paid whores. Maybe it was the thrill of the forbidden, maybe it was the simple mechanics of having a third person involved, but he knew in his heart of hearts that the connection was the difference. Wilson was his oldest, best, truest and most exasperating companion in life. It was just different. Just like he had felt the difference between sleeping with Stacey and with hookers; connection was important. He’d realised that he’d missed it; why else would he be wasting money on kissing hookers who were willing to sleep over on occasion?

The girl - _Clarise, that was her name_ \- turned and crouched over him, back now to him and he felt himself being sheathed yet again. But it wasn’t her… he knew it and every nerve in his body tingled with disbelief. He watched, dumbly, as she moved aside and he saw Wilson, head thrown back, eyes half-lidded, thigh muscles quivering as he slowly let his weight push him down ever more onto House.

‘James,’ House sighed, almost without realising it and felt more than a hint of embarrassment, as though he’d just spilled a closely kept secret (so closely kept he hadn’t even known about it himself). This was entirely unexpected but somehow it wasn’t… it wasn’t wrong. He felt none of the disgust or repulsion he might have expected pushing inside a male body, and it wasn’t only because he was a long way past the point of stopping now. Something was uncurling in his belly, a tension he hadn’t even noticed was there, and every part of him was humming with joy at its release. He wanted this. He really did.

 _“You’ll never leave me again now,”_ his mind said, independently of him, and House told it to shut up (even if he did hope that the sentiment was right; that this was the ultimate confirmation that Wilson would never run out of his life again).

After a few moments of adjustment, and with a deep breath, Wilson pulled the hooker back so that she was crouching over House, her back once again to him, and House heard himself growl with annoyance at not being able to see him anymore. It quickly passed as Wilson pushed into her and wrapped his arms around her, the motion caused by every thrust he made being carried through to him as his friend let him slide in and out of his body, slow at first and quicker as the pace of his fucking increased.

House gripped onto the sheets, unable to prevent himself from gasping with every movement, his mind whirling with thoughts of what was happening. This was his friend. Wilson, _fucking Wilson_. It made no sense and yet made every sense in the world.

 _‘Why not? Why not date you? It’s brilliant!’_ he heard Wilson say, flippantly, in his mind.

 _‘Oh my god, you’re sleeping with me!’_ he heard himself say and would have smiled wanly had all his muscles, face and body alike, not been completely taken over with the act of actually sleeping with Wilson. Didn’t seem quite so funny now.

He looked on, fascinated, as Wilson grasped onto the woman between them and hardened his thrusts into her as he came, gasps growing heavier, and House cried out from the back of his throat at the sensations that caused with Wilson’s internal muscles quivering and tightening. She was then moved aside and rolled over to catch her breath on the other side of the bed. Wilson’s eyes were once again on House. On House, in House, through House.

House was close, so close, but he was also scared. What would this mean for their friendship? What was going to happen next? He wanted to come so badly but he didn’t want things to change between them.

‘I can’t,’ he gasped, though it took all his effort to do it. ‘I can’t…’

Wilson slowed his movements a little and smiled. He leaned forwards a little to take hold of one of House’s hands (it was still sticky with lube) and squeezed it. ‘You can,’ he breathed. He took hold of House’s other hand and placed them both onto his hips, holding them there as he began to move his body up and down more urgently.

There was no way to stop now. House held tightly onto Wilson like he would fall to pieces if he let go. He began to move as well, for the first time since this impromptu orgy had started, thrusting to meet his movements, moaning and gasping at the sensation of being inside someone he actually cared about. Then he was coming in a rush that made him giddy enough almost to float away. The thrill of the unknown made it so good it almost hurt.

Then Wilson slowly leaned over him, the perspiration on their chests meeting and they kissed through the glow that followed. When that faded, he looked up to see Wilson’s eyes were soft and loving and his lips debauched and House knew that there was nothing in the world he wanted more right then than to hold on and preserve this thoroughly ruffled Wilson. He was so much more interesting than the perfectly groomed, buttoned-down version he was used to.

Both of them had forgotten the third person in the room entirely until she gasped a laugh and said, ‘I always wondered what that would be like.’

Wilson looked at her and his cheeks went an interesting shade of red. He pulled away and carefully removed both of their condoms, also picking up one he had removed after their original position. He tied the filled ones up and threw them all over into the trash. Then he bounced himself off the bed and started to retrieve his clothing from around the room.

And just like that, in bare seconds, Wilson was gone. He disappeared into the front room and barely moments later the light was flicked off and the front door closed.

House lay back in his pillow, staring into the ceiling, a vaguely shocked expression on his face. Clarise - _or was it Candy… oh fuck it!_ \- pushed the debris from his drawer onto the floor and pulled his covers back over them both. She snuggled down on the other half of the bed and looked over at him.

‘Wait… that was planned right? I just got up for a glass of water and he was there and he said…’

‘Yeah, it was planned,’ he lied to get her to shut the hell up and leave him to his thoughts.

He didn’t sleep too well the rest of that night; dread building in his stomach over seeing his friend at work the next day. What the hell was he going to say to him?

_Hey Wilson, great lay! Let’s do it again some time?_

_Hey Wilson, thanks for making me come like a freight train! Appreciated buddy._

_Hey Wilson, about last night…_

Fuck.

\---

At almost 11am the next day, House saw Wilson walk past his office window with a green file under his arm.

He suddenly realised that that was the forth time he’d seen that happen. Always at 10.58. Always with the green file. But only when he was in his office to observe…

Or maybe not. Maybe it was every day and he just hadn’t been there to see. Why was Wilson doing that every day at exactly the same time? He was a doctor, his daily routine wasn’t that regular, surely?

 _What if_ the head injury he’d sustained had been more serious then it looked?

 _What if_ the flower petals on his cucumbers had been deliberate?

 _What if_ he was visiting an out-of-his-way doctor for more than just sleep problems?

It couldn’t be ignored that wanting to get fucked by his very male best friend went against everything House knew about him over so many years of friendship. The situation hadn’t even been leading that way, it had been a clear choice on Wilson’s part to go as far as he did.

The ball House had been bouncing on the end of his cane rolled away along the office floor as he failed to move to catch it.

Something was wrong with Wilson. He knew it. He _knew_ it.


	3. Chapter 3

The morning after the night before, House found himself avoiding Wilson.

He had gotten in before any of his team for the first time in, well, a very long time and all he could think about was _not_ seeing Wilson.

Now _this_ was new. Generally, if it ever came to it, it was the other way around.

When he’d woken up, early enough to put even the most vehement Morning Bird to shame, he’d immediately thought it had all been imagined. Crazy dreams and all that. Then he’d discovered the contents of his bedside table drawer still tipped out on the floor, three condoms in the trash and a business card on his table from the hooker – _her name was Cora!_ – with a note for him and his boyfriend to call her again anytime.

The last piece of evidence was the most bewildering, since he’d never had one leave him a card like that before. He would have laughed if he hadn’t been too busy contemplating a minor nervous breakdown.

His first inclination had been to call Wilson and ask what the hell… and he’d chickened out of that almost immediately. Instead he’d downed some pills and gone for a shower, only for every drop of water to feel the way Wilson’s fingers had felt as they’d danced on his skin, for the heat to remind of the way Wilson’s body, harder and stronger than any other body he’d been so intimate with, had felt against and around him and the dew on the glass to make him think of the way Wilson’s eyes had sparkled with pleasure. The more he’d tried not to think about it the more vivid it had become in his mind.

House had known then and there that he would have no choice but to figure out this new and exciting piece of the thousand-sided Rubik’s Cube that was James Evan Wilson. That was just how he was. And he’d gone to work that morning dreading the onset of his need to find out, because it would inevitably bring him into contact with Wilson and he really wasn’t sure how he was going to react.

This was a very new situation for him. He couldn’t deny that then, in the heat of the moment, he’d wanted to fuck Wilson and damned enjoyed it when he had. But would he ever have done any of that had Wilson himself not initiated it? Almost certainly not. It was just not on his radar to consider it and he’d certainly never suspected Wilson had been into kinky threesomes. Not like that, anyway.

So at the moment, House was attempting avoidance. A whole morning of not going across to harass Wilson felt like a record somehow since he was actively thinking about him.

Mostly he managed it with the thought of what would happen when he’d have to look into Wilson’s eyes here, in their normal environment, and find out exactly how he felt about his friend now.

The team noticed his distracted state pretty much immediately. As files of potential new cases to diagnose were handed out, House accidently dropped his in the sink and pretended not to notice, and Taub tartly suggested he go talk to Wilson and come back when he was more in the mood to save lives.

Ordinarily, he would have torn the little guy a new one for such a bold remark but instead, he’d gone wandering, a little concerned that his touchiness about Wilson was already being noted down. He’d ended up visiting Cameron and staring into her eyes in what was probably a creepy manner, just to make sure he still got that little buzz at the thought of a young and beautiful girl like her having a “thing” for him. That was still there. He still liked the idea of getting in her pants so… _heterosexuality, check._

Next he went to find Thirteen for a private talk. This was less of a personal call and more of a business call. After all, he couldn’t ignore the main problem with his avoidance; he was still pretty certain there was something wrong with Wilson, something requiring attention and observation to figure out. So far he had no proof except a list of odd behavior and a gut feeling but without interacting with him, all he could do was covertly test his blood sample from storage - clean - and set someone else on the trail. Thirteen was his choice for the task, because he didn’t trust Foreman not to tell Cuddy, he didn’t trust Taub and Kutner not to tell each other and giggle like girls in a storage closet, and she was bisexual enough not to care if he ended up having to share one particular symptom to solve what was wrong with his friend. She was reluctant to go along with it but an impassioned plea with a gesture of genuine feeling had got her onboard… _Wilson diagnosis, check._

But that was when he heard the rumor.

According to the nurses, Cuddy had disappeared for the whole morning because she was bailing one of the heads of department out of jail. The less well-informed staff members had naturally assumed it was House (bless them). He’d soon discovered the truth however; it had been Wilson.

Naturally, the first thing he did was burst into Cuddy’s office, take up residence in her chair and glare at her. ‘Why was Wilson in jail?’ he asked out loud, while in his mind he actually asked _“why did Wilson call you instead of me?”_

Cuddy exhaled a long, devastated sigh of tiredness. ‘Who told you?’

‘It’s all the news around here. Of course, I first suspected it was a misinformation campaign spread to counter the rumors about you really being a man but, since that one still seems to be going strong…’

‘It was nothing serious,’ she cut him off, sharply. ‘It was a misunderstanding. And he called me instead of you because he didn’t want you to find out. Lord knows why,’ she added, with all her powers of sarcasm engaged.

‘As far as I’m aware, a misunderstanding isn’t a chargeable offence. So…?’

She gave him a sour look.

‘DUI? DWI? DWAI? Help me out here or I’m going to run out of acronyms…’

‘Shoplifting,’ she told him, through gritted teeth.

House stared at her for what seemed like a long time, his forehead getting ever more creased.

‘Just a tube of toothpaste, some razors and a bunch of other small crap he stopped to pick up on his way in this morning. He just forgot to pay but the clerk was being a real bitch about it. He got a little, well, heated in his argument with her and the staff, and earned himself a few hours in jail this morning to cool off. No big deal.’

House was frozen in place.

_Memory problems? Another symptom?_

‘What?’ Cuddy noticed his expression and hers grew concerned. ‘House, what is it?’

‘Nothing.’

‘No, I know that look. What is it?’

He snapped himself out of it and managed to look affronted. ‘Aren’t we the suspicious one?’ House got up and moved to get out of her office before she really started to suspect something was going on.

‘Hold on,’ she called after him, hurriedly moving around her desk to catch up.

House turned and the slight softening in her eyes drew his attention back to her fully.

‘I have a table booked this evening in the new restaurant on third, Georgios. I’ll pick you up at eight?’

She gave him a small smile and he tried his best not to look as uncomfortable as he actually felt. ‘You paying?’ he asked, quietly and with none of the caustic venom of their usual exchanges.

‘I’d be shocked if I weren’t,’ she responded, her eyes just a little brighter for his affirmative response.

House gave her a slight nod and left, cringing a little inside because… surely it was wrong to have a romantic meal with your admittedly comely boss, with suggestions of more if the look in her eyes was anything to go by, when the last person you’d screwed had been your male best friend? Wasn’t that an unwritten rule somewhere?

As he passed through the clinic, his thoughts of Cuddy were quickly replaced with thoughts of Wilson and this mystery illness. His mind was going through possible diagnoses… _B12 deficiency could explain the memory loss, some of the strange behaviour, the pica if it actually was pica… but the blood had been clean; thyroid issues could be a good explanation; then again, what about lead poisoning of some kind?; no, there’d be more symptoms so signs are towards something neurological but if it’s neurological it’s almost certainly serious; but what about the sleeping problem? was the head injury part of the cause or just a random event?_ … and he wasn’t getting anything. It was all too vague.

House knew he had two obvious ways to conduct a little background research without interacting with his subject. First off, he could go to Wilson’s place and search it. The problem with that was that Wilson knew him far too well to ever leave anything incriminating, like pills, somewhere that would be easily unearthed. He knew that for a fact because he’d never found pills in any previous occasions he’d poked through Wilson’s stuff in his apartment and that had previously kept him from knowing his friend was on antidepressants. On that occasion, he’d had to diagnose on sight to find out.

No, searching Wilson’s place would be useless. The other obvious way was more tricky but he decided he’d probably get something out of it. He knew that Wilson had been seeing a doctor in Princeton General for his sleeping pills, so somehow he needed to pry some information out of that source to find out more about what the problem might be.

House took out a hundred dollars in cash and snuck out of the hospital before any new mystery cases could materialise to monopolise his time.

\---

The nurse at the front desk of Princeton General had been a real hard nosed bitch but in the end she’d relented. Sort of.

He’d met her out behind the hospital on her smoking break, as requested, and handed over seventy bucks. Only then did she confirm that she still wasn’t going to give him Wilson’s file, but only supply him with some tidbits of info that she knew herself.

House had been dissatisfied with this con trick up until the point he realised that she actually knew quite a lot about Wilson. He had been going there regularly for a good six months and had been seeing not one, but three different doctors. Dr Fingringhoe was, in fact, every bit the shrink he had guessed he was. But Dr Nelson was a neurologist and Dr Singh was a behavioural therapist and Wilson had been seeing them for appointments too. He’d also had a lot of visits to the MRI.

_It’s something neurological. Something which causes sleep problems, maybe some form of repetitive behaviour, the possible pica, that memory issue…_

The nurse didn’t know what his condition was, but House was irritated to learn that the first few months he had come in with a blonde woman “with a real attitude problem”. Whatever Wilson had, Amber had known about it, and together they had kept it from him. House had no idea why that piece of information felt like more of a gut punch than the actual confirmation that Wilson was sick but it did.

It was a betrayal of the _“he loved her more than he loved you”_ variety. That was almost the deepest kind to him when it came to Wilson, only marginally trumped by the going-away-and-declaring-their-friendship-dead thing he’d experienced post-Amber.

Damn that woman. She couldn’t have just been one of Wilson’s usual needy hormonal extended lays he would have married, set up house with and quickly started to ignore in favour of House. No, she had to be a walking, talking, breathing, living clone of him with added neediness and, even better, _added vagina_ ; the one mythical creature with the potential to be of more fascination to him than House. Wilson had found his unicorn and ditched his horse.

So Wilson had been seeing three doctors for something neurological, causing a need for behavioural therapy and sessions with a psychologist. Repeated sessions in the MRI over a period of time, rather than only one or two, indicated something chronic and progressive. That narrowed it down slightly but it was still far too broad for him to diagnose. So far it was only narrow enough for him to worry.

House didn’t thank the nurse. There was no reason to. She hadn’t really earned her money and she hadn’t given Wilson a clean bill of health. Instead he hobbled back to his motorcycle and sat on it for a few minutes, thinking.

That was when his phone went off in his pocket, and Thirteen gave him a sharp and short message. A little snooping on her part had snagged an interesting new factoid to consider. The green file Wilson had been wandering around with daily was, in fact, empty.

As House put on his helmet and pulled out of the parking lot of Princeton General, he started to wonder how he hadn’t noticed any of this before. _Wilson’s head injury had to have caused a subdural hematoma, a very minor one so as not to be obvious, but one which had inflamed whatever neurological problem he had already been dealing with. Then again, a temporal lobe disturbance could possibly cause an increase in sexual behaviour…_

He knew this was going to torment him but he was determined to find out before having to take the step of going to see Wilson himself to pry it out of him. He wasn’t quite ready for that, especially if it did turn out that their little sexual jaunt with the hooker had been nothing but a brain disturbance in Wilson because then… well… how in hell would he explain having gone along with it?

\---

The next thing he knew, he was sitting down to a nice, romantic meal with his boss. Her breasts were working it. The food was good, if a little pretentious for his taste. It really should all have been working for him.

He did like Cuddy, in his own way. He’d slept with her once before a long time ago, and they’d both known it had been a big mistake. But now the weight of years passing and the maternal drive kicking in had apparently made Cuddy a little insane, in that special middle-aged-single-woman way that was never really endearing. He wasn’t sure why he’d kissed her after she didn’t get a new baby to play with. He wasn’t sure why he was having a meal with her. He wasn’t sure how she could think that her biological clock had the magical power to change reality and transform him into an upstanding companion and father for her future child.

Ordinarily, House would have been pushing this to see how far it would go before that beautiful glass mirror Cuddy was looking through smashed. That was the nature of their relationship and it always had been. Ordinarily, this quiet meal would have been a good opportunity to prod the scab she was picking at and see what he could squeeze out of it but his mind was too far away to engage.

Finally, he couldn’t help but turn the conversation the way his mind was working on the off-chance Cuddy was in on what was going on with Wilson. He didn’t think she was, or he would have expected more of a reaction to his recent head injury, but it didn’t hurt to check, and/or plant a seed of curiosity in her mind.

‘So, did you know Wilson’s been seeing doctors in Princeton General?’ he asked, not caring that he was cutting off another completely unrelated sentence she had started.

Cuddy’s eyes widened a little and her forkful of pasta hovered in the air. ‘Seeing as in booty call?’

‘No,’ he tutted and rolled his eyes at the prospect. ‘Seeing in the medical sense. Looks to me like he’s using up his medical insurance in quite a spectacular way. You can’t tell me you didn’t know about it.’

Sensing an edge to his tone, her back straightened and her expression went from soft to professional in 0 to 2 seconds. ‘Not my job to personally monitor the medical insurance of every person on my staff. Besides, Wilson’s barely had a cold since the day he started. I’m sure he’s got plenty of medical insurance coming to him.’ Cuddy ate the food from her hovering fork and looked at House with concern in her eyes, as if the idea was beginning to geminate in her mind. ‘What for?’

’I don’t know.’

‘You haven’t asked him?’

House winced a little and hoped she hadn’t seen it. ‘I thought it would be more fun not to.’

‘All right, what tiny tidbits of information have you teased out of the myriad of random sources in order to come to some sort of chaotic conclusion based on nothing but your own wishes for it to make a higher sort of sense?’

She did know him. He had to give her that. ‘Three doctors. Psychiatrist.’

‘Knew about that one.’

‘Neurologist.’

Cuddy paused at that one. ‘O..kay?’

‘Behavioural therapist.’

House pinpointed the exact moment her nonchalance passed over into genuine concern.

She reached for her wine glass and took a big gulp. ‘Tell me nothing was missed when he cracked his head a few weeks ago?’

‘Nope, this has been going on for six months. Lots of MRIs and CT scans. Not a word.’

Cuddy sat back in her chair to contemplate what she had been told. ‘Amber must have known,’ she muttered under her breath and House found himself glaring at that reminder. ‘He hasn’t said anything to me.’

‘No?’

‘No,’ she snapped and glared back. ‘You think I’m lying?’

‘Well we all know how cosy you are with him when things like jail sentences come up, so it seemed obvious to me that…’

‘Damn it, the lapse of concentration in that shop.’ She sighed, deeply. ‘I should have seen it.’

 _“Well, he didn’t have a threesome with you and a hooker, so the signs weren’t so obvious,”_ House thought and smiled a little to himself at the concept of that happening with Cuddy along for the ride.

‘So… what’s the brilliant diagnosis Doctor House? You must have something if you’re coming to me with this? Especially, you know, now…’ She looked about their admittedly romantic surroundings to emphasise the inappropriateness of it.

‘It’s… pending,’ House admitted ‘Thirteen’s been trailing him, taking notes…’

‘You’ve got your team staking out Wilson…?’

‘Mystery illnesses are our speciality. You can’t stop the miracle men.’ House drank down some of his wine, hoping to finish their evening together that much sooner in doing so. ‘Oh don’t act surprised.’

‘Has it occurred to you that Wilson’s condition is not, in fact, a mystery illness to him?’

‘Whaaaa?’ he said in his dumbest, most caustic tone of voice.

‘You actually thought it would be more fun to stake him out like an animal caught in a wire and watch for signs of choking? You’re unbelievable.’ Cuddy pulled her phone out of her purse.

‘Hey, wait… what are you…?’ House tried in vain to stop her.

‘Hi Wilson. I know it’s late but…’

House reached over, grabbed the phone and dropped it in his wine glass. As he picked it up and gently swirled the contents around, ensuring maximum damage, he spared a thought of gratitude that he hadn’t drunk up fast enough after all.

Cuddy looked like she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to yell, gasp or smack him around the head.

A waiter passed by to offer more wine and looked bug-eyed when he noticed what was in House’s glass. ‘There’s a phone in my wine. I’ll be complaining to the Manager later,’ he said and waved the man away.

‘Just when I think you’ve gone completely insane you find new and interesting ways to prove to me just how much further you have to go,’ she said, bitingly. ‘And stop tapping!’

House looked down at his fingers on the table and realised that he was, indeed, tapping absent-mindedly to the music playing out around them for the customers to enjoy.

_Dum duh-duh-duh- dum duh-duh-duh dum dum. Dum duh-duh-duh- dum duh-duh-duh duh-duh-duh duh-duh-duh…_

He knew this piece of music. It was Ravel’s Boléro. Hypnotic tantric sex song of choice for the 1990s. Not that he’d ever had that pleasure…

For a moment, he saw Wilson in his mind, sitting astride him as he had the previous night, moving almost in time to the repeating pizzicato cello section of the music as something teased around the edges of his vision. An idea trying to emerge…

Then, something suddenly clicked in his mind and House stopped breathing as he stared off into the empty space where epiphanies are made.

‘What?’ Cuddy asked, more than a little irritably.

‘I know what’s wrong with Wilson.’

 _Dum duh-duh-duh- dum duh-duh-duh dum dum_ he continued to tap along.

_Dum duh-duh-duh- dum duh-duh-duh duh-duh-duh duh-duh-duh…_

House had grabbed his jacket and left the restaurant before Cuddy even had a chance to ask him what it was, and what tapping on a table had to do with it.

Instead she had to sit back and look at her ruined phone, now come sadly to rest at the bottom of House’s wine glass like a modern-day Titanic. A sad end to the evening, indeed.

\---

House debated whether to go straight to Wilson’s place for to initiate a Hercule Poirot-esque reveal but couldn’t bring himself to do that.

Instead, he ended up driving home and doing some reading on the subject at hand in his medical journals. He took an irate phone call from Cuddy - from her home phone - and wearily told he would talk to her tomorrow and extracted her agreement not to talk to Wilson until he’d confirmed his diagnosis. Then he sat at his piano for the rest of the evening, playing some of his favourite classical pieces to settle his mind.

But every now and then allowing his fingers to go back to playing a simple memorised version of that old hypnotic tune by Ravel.

The thing about Ravel, which House had learned at some point in his readings a long time ago, was that he had a neurological disease when he wrote that piece of music. In fact, the music was something of an expression of its symptoms; the repeating phraseology, the relentless crescendo and the continuing downturn into more and more chaotic sound. Ravel had had the rare but devastatingly perfect condition known as frontotemporal dementia, or FTD; something which fit staggeringly well with all the symptoms House had observed in Wilson, aside for a few factors which he now thought had been red herrings.

First of all, the sleeping disorder. Not a sleeping disorder at all, he now realised. Not really.

_FTD patients are often resistant to sleeping pills, requiring the strongest types to have any effect at all._

The sleepwalking, or fugue-state walking more accurately, would only have been a side effect of taking ridiculously strong drugs to get to sleep, and not part of the condition at all. A red herring.

Secondly, the memory loss. Not memory loss at all. Wilson would have said he’d forgotten to pay for that stuff he’d stolen in the store because, well, what else could he have said? Everybody lies, Wilson included. House thought now that his little robbery had been perpetrated entirely on purpose, but that Wilson probably wouldn’t have realised he was doing it until the alarms sounded.

_Impulse control is an early symptom in FTD patients, along with behavioural changes and sometimes newly formed OCD tendencies._

The green file thing. Wilson might not even have realised he was doing it, but it was an OCD behaviour arising from the FTD. House guessed that maybe even the visiting him in the middle of the night had been an unintentionally formed OCD behaviour caused by his accident and his half-concussed impulse to find House. It made a strange sort of sense.

The petals on his cucumbers also fit. Chances were Wilson had swiped them off on impulse and hid anything else strange under that mess of a salad he had been eating that day.

_Pica tendencies may also present in some cases as a manifestation of the behavioural difficulties experienced._

House hadn’t observed anything else too untoward in Wilson’s eating patterns but he couldn’t rule it out that he had just missed something, or Wilson had been more adept at hiding it after that. Either way, it too fit.

As for the sex? The big question.

He supposed that fitted in under the banner of impulse control issues and possibly even behavioural changes.

House was, to his eternal guilt, a little relieved that he’d pretty much ruled out the possibility that the sex had been part of Wilson’s neurological problem. At least, not structurally. Yes, it was part of impulse thing, but it wasn’t something utterly uncontrollable. In fact, it told him that the sex hadn’t been entirely unpremeditated. For all he knew, all those nights Wilson had come to his apartment, probably still in a drug-induced fugue state from the uber-strong sleeping pills, before waking up and running out again had been Wilson’s subconscious mind attempting to take him, quite literally, for a joyride.

And then, one early morning, he met a very good-looking young hooker in House’s kitchen and couldn’t resist anymore.

The more he thought about it, the more House knew it all made sense. Wilson was too young for Alzeimer’s but exactly the right age for FTD. The symptoms fit. The doctors he was seeing fit.

_It is extremely common for early stage FTD to initially present in ways which may be mistaken for depression. Sufferers are often erroneously prescribed anti-depressants before the true cause of their illness becomes clear._

Damn it, even that fit all too well.

_Dum duh-duh-duh- dum duh-duh-duh dum dum. Dum duh-duh-duh- dum duh-duh-duh duh-duh-duh duh-duh-duh…_

House thought his heart might be starting to beat the same rhythm as the song, like a broken clock. Because for all the triumph of solving the case, he felt absolutely devastated.

_FTD is not yet curable or preventable._

_Dum duh-duh-duh- dum duh-duh-duh dum dum. Dum duh-duh-duh- dum duh-duh-duh duh-duh-duh duh-duh-duh…_


	4. Chapter 4

House had absolutely no idea what he was doing but it seemed as good a way as any to proceed. He walked into Wilson’s office like he always had, with a showy swagger, went over to Wilson’s desk and dropped a manilla envelope he had prepared earlier on top of the one Wilson had been reading.

The patented expression of slightly-bewildered, slightly-resigned irritation looked up to him and then back down at the file.

House said nothing. He just fixed him with a death state and stood back, waiting, hoping to make this quick, before he had to start the process of reassessing their friendship based on any new sensations he felt at the sight of him.

Wilson sighed and opened the envelope, pulling out some duplicates House had had prepared - at some small cost - of the brain scans taken from a patient in neurology with FTD.

He thought he saw a momentary pinching around Wilson’s eyes at the sight of it, though it was quickly schooled into submission until he couldn’t be certain he hadn’t imagined it.

‘Well, it’s not cancer,’ Wilson pronounced and sat back in his chair, as usual waiting for the punchline.

House gave him a short, sharp nod and continued to wait for his assessment with a scowl. Scowling made it easier to do this without throttling him, or fucking him, or both in succession.

‘Here’s a novel idea, House. You have a neurologist on your team. Ask him.’ Wilson started to put the scans back into the envelope but was stopped as House rapped his knuckles with his cane. ‘Ow!’ he yelled, in what had to be an exaggerated pain.

If he’d have managed to procure Wilson’s own scans it would have been a simpler matter, he supposed; a nice shiny file with his friend’s name stamped on it like a blazing gun. As it was, Wilson still had no reason to suspect his secret was out, as much as House really didn’t want to have to validate the matter by proclaiming his suspicions himself.

So he went over to the windows and stood looking out onto their almost-shared balcony, wondering how to proceed. House had known this would be the response but he hadn’t planned ahead for it; he couldn’t. He barely wanted to think about it, let alone enact the tedious forcing of a confession. ‘Did you think I wouldn’t figure it out?’ he muttered at a growl.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a flash of guilt pass across his friend’s features and it made his stomach collapse.

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ Wilson said with an apparent new resolve. ‘Though, while we’re on the subject of noticing things, did you think I wouldn’t notice the mysterious disappearance of six hundred dollars from my wallet yesterday morning?’

House span around and gaped a little at that. He narrowed his eyes and turned away again, irritated by Wilson’s apparent attempt to subvert proceedings and play the “sleep-walking” angle to cover his behaviour the other night, and presumably to feign innocence of his condition.

Well, two could play at that game. He turned his expression into one of silent suffering and stared off outside. With a timing taught by years of friendship, he glanced back out of the corner of his eye at just the moment Wilson briefly looked down and sighed in guilt. Bingo.

Seeing no one across the way in his office to look in, House hobbled back towards Wilson’s desk with a fresh resolve not to let his friend get away with that. He moved around it and leaned back to put his weight on the edge. When Wilson looked up at him, he dropped his cane aside, grabbed him by his collar and pulled him up out of his seat to kiss him, deeply and with no trace of the hesitation he was feeling about the whole thing.

When they broke apart, Wilson at first looked shocked but the expression melted away back into guilt.

‘I know as well as you do that you remember everything.’

‘And I know you stole my new prescription for Halcion,’ Wilson countered. ‘Just as I was beginning to sleep more or less properly again.’ He pulled away and sat down, adjusting his pulled up shirt back to normal.

‘You weren’t on anything when you wandered over to mine with your head cracked half open and tried to suck my face off.’

‘Concussion, remember? Besides, _you_ weren’t on anything when you let me…’ He stopped abruptly.

‘That was all your idea, as I recall,’ House said, and then continued as he saw a flash of pain in Wilson’s face. ‘Not that I can complain.’

‘No?’

‘No,’ House replied involuntarily, but had to continue, ‘but…’

‘But?’

‘But you weren’t yourself, were you? You’re still not.’ He picked up the scans of a dying brain and held them up to the light. ‘I’m right aren’t I?’

Wilson looked back and forth between him and the thin films of plastic before snatching them from his hands and throwing them aside. ‘You don’t know anything.’

‘I know a lot about you. I also know a lot about people hiding symptoms of a degenerative neurological condition…’

All of a sudden, Wilson and his chair were parted with a loud and the man was moving quickly across the room, hand compulsively stroking the back of his head in his usual gesture of distress. ‘You don’t know anything,’ he repeated.

‘You already said that. Is repetition a symptom?’ House snarked.

Wilson paused to throw him an annoyed look and then he sat down on his couch, specifically not facing House. ‘Second year of medical school. I had a really good friend. We were housemates for about eight or nine months, along with three others. A couple of months after we met, I found out he was gay. At first, I was a little freaked. Then one night we got very drunk and, well… The events of that very drunk night turned into a pretty regular thing. Not exactly anything official. I still saw my fair share of women, and enjoyed it, and he had a few flings too, but…’

‘Why are you telling me this?’ House asked with a calculated tone of distain designed to hide his desire to hear more.

‘I’m explaining why what you’re thinking is completely wrong..’ Wilson took in and then exhaled an almighty breath of exasperation mixed with discomfort. ‘The point of that little tale being that I’ve always wondered about what it would be like. With us I mean. What happened the other night, I mean.’

‘You’ve never been with a hooker before?’ House teased with his best poker face.

That earned him a half-hearted glare. ‘Not the hooker, House. You know what I mean. And I just wanted to present a historical perspective because I can tell you’ve got it in your head that… that this thing I have…’

House mentally noted down the fact that Wilson was even struggling to say what it was as being possibly indicative of his still being in denial.

‘…didn’t make me do what I did. While it may have made it a little easier to go there, it wasn’t the underlying cause. The underlying cause is that you’re all I have, you son of a bitch, and I’m all you have and it makes sense.’

‘To screw each other’s brains out?’

‘Yes!’

‘You do realise that you’ve just confirmed my diagnosis. I realise I’m a towering hunk of masculinity but if I’m the best you can do, you really are losing it.’

Wilson fixed him with a penetrating stare that made him wriggle a little under the scrutiny. ‘Fine,’ he said, like a spiteful child. ‘You didn’t like it, fine by me. Go have sex with Cuddy.’

‘How did we even get onto this?’ House snapped. ‘I came here to tell you you’re an idiot. And you’re being treated for FTD. And you didn’t tell me.’

‘It’s… private.’

‘You told Amber.’ It just slipped out and House wished he hadn’t mentioned her hallowed name the moment the temperature in the room dropped below zero.

‘You know what?’ Wilson said, after a moment of thought, ‘I can’t deal with this right now. Get out.’

‘Don’t be such a…’

‘Get the hell out of here!’

Wilson grabbed him by the arm and manhandled him to the door. He pushed him out and slammed it, not paying any attention as House whimpered at his leg protesting his attempts not to fall over.

A few seconds later, Wilson’s door opened again and his cane was tossed out. ‘For crying out loud Wilson…’ he began, but it was slammed again before he could complete the sentence.

House turned around to find Taub and Kutner and a few other non-descript staff members standing around the corridor staring at him and Cuddy almost on him like a cheetah going for the kill.

‘Are you going to tell me what’s wrong with him, now?’ she asked, although her expression was telling him that there was only one answer to that she would accept.

He gave her a nod. Might as well get it over with since Wilson clearly wasn’t going to share with him himself.

They adjourned to her office for begin one of the most difficult conversations in House’s recent memory.

\---

‘House.’ Wilson said, almost before his front door was even open. ‘What a surprise,’ he said, in a distinctly unsurprised manner.

As House pushed his way past him and dropped some bags of Chinese food onto his coffee table, Wilson rolled his eyes.

‘Can’t eat Chinese,’ Wilson said as he approached. ‘FTD patients aren’t allowed.’

‘Lies.’

‘I was going for light comic relief.’

‘I take it your sense of humor was the first thing to go?’

Wilson went to grab some plates from the kitchen to make the impromptu evening meal at his place easier to clean up later on. He then set them down at the table and helped share out their portions as House switched on the TV and found something vaguely interesting sports-wise to have on in the background.

‘You should treasure my sense of humor while I still have it,’ Wilson remarked, lightly. ‘I’m lucky to still be stringing constructive sentences together.’

‘Hmm,’ House grunted, a little disturbed at the thought. ‘I hear language skills can be a common casualty early on.’ God, he was pathetically glad for the distraction of food and TV, as it allowed for conversation to pass between them with not so much as a glance exchanged or even a presence acknowledged. It made it so much easier.

‘No, so far I’ve mostly got an impulse control problem. And the OCD. And the sleep issues. The fun stuff. But hey, only for starters. Eventually, as it progresses, who knows what craziness will ensue.’

‘Sounds promising,’ House said around a mouthful of noodles.

‘Good times. Unfortunately it means I’m going to need to be on my guard around you more so I don’t start acting out some more of my wackier impulses.’

‘Oh?’ This time, House couldn’t help but turn to gape at him a little, like a deer in the headlights.

‘Well it’s always a struggle not to throttle you.’

‘I get that.’

‘I do sometimes think about sabotaging things in your office. Collapsible chairs. Punctured balls. Worn out marker pens. Vague misdemeanours, you know?’

‘Check check and check.’

‘And of course if I ever yell for you to come screw me over my desk, you’re going to have to be the strong one.’

Wilson chuckled to himself as House not-so-subtlely adjusted his jeans a little. ‘So are we going to talk seriously about this now?’ he asked as he shovelled some pork and rice into his mouth.

‘Depends. Are you going to keep acting like there’s nothing wrong?’ House asked, grimly.

‘Might do. I’ve gotten away with it until now.’

‘Ah, but it’s been getting a lot more obvious lately.’

‘True. So… I guess we can talk about it seriously. I think the first question on your mind will be, how did I find out?’

House started flicking through channels to keep his attention occupied while the more uncomfortable stuff started to come up. ‘We can start there.’

But Wilson grabbed the remote and turned the TV off, turning to House fully as he did. ‘Amber was a way better doctor than you ever gave her credit for. You should have hired her.’

House stared at him for a moment before turning away. ‘I know.’

‘She noticed the signs, somehow. I didn’t realise I was doing half the stuff I was doing. That’s the worst part, repeating things like someone with OCD would, except not even seeing the patterns appearing. It’s a weird sensation. Amber cornered me and made me get a brain scan.’ Wilson was looking off into his memories. ‘But you know what? When we found out, she didn’t run. She was going to stay with me. Help me.’

‘Hm,’ House grunted, hating that idea. So he’d not only managed to kill off Wilson’s lover, but his personal Jesus as well. Too damned perfect, that was her problem.

‘I panicked a little when she died, I admit. But I’m coping now.’

‘Hm,’ he grunted again, not quite sure what to say now.

‘Oh and now you want to know why I didn’t tell you.’

That was as good a question as any, so House nodded.

‘Not sure. Possibly because I was hoping not to make an issue out of it. I also didn’t want Cuddy to know. That sort of thing’s a real job killer in the long-run.’

‘Thirteen’s coping with her personal medical crisis and is still, you’ll note, finding paid employment.’

Wilson nodded but his eyes looked a little deader than they had even a minute ago. ‘For now,’ he replied, quietly, and pushed his food away. ‘Chances are she’ll be with you longer than I will.’

‘Don’t be so dramatic. You’re not going to die before she does.’

‘It’s likely. Could be in a few years. Eight to ten is the usual prognosis. I won’t be me by then anyway.’ Wilson’s hand fell rather close to House’s thigh as if he was seeking a vague line of connection. ‘I’m going to lose my mind.’

House stopped eating his food and turned his attention to trying not to bring it back up. That was ridiculous. It was crazy. It was absolutely true and he hated it.

‘I don’t have a lot of time left...’ Wilson began, sidling a little closer to his friend.

‘Have you told Cameron?’ he deflected. ‘Guaranteed lay.’

‘House,’ Wilson sighed and left the couch under the pretext of cleaning away some of the take-out mess aside.

‘I’m not quite sure what you’re expecting from me,’ House admitted.

‘Nothing really. I just want you to know the offer is on the table.’

‘Offer…?’

Wilson sat back down and turned the television back on for some background noise. ‘You want me to spell it out?’

‘Couldn’t hurt, you know, while you still can.’

‘I’d rather go out with a bang and you’re the only one I care about enough to… bang with.’

For a moment, the humor of the situation consumed them both and they couldn’t help but snigger together like school boys sharing a particularly fatalistic joke.

‘I don’t suppose it would make any difference if I argued that I’m too straight for it,’ House said, finally, ‘considering how things went the other night.’

‘I’m predominantly straight too, as you, me, my ex-wives and my divorce lawyers know. But, well, you have to admit it’s not bad.’

House could tell Wilson was leaning in and he found himself doing the same. ‘No. Not bad at all,’ he muttered and allowed himself to fall into a kiss which tasted of Chinese food, coffee and electricity.

‘Is that a “yes, I’ll be your call boy, Wilson”?’ Wilson asked, innocently.

‘It’s a “let’s see how things go” I think.’

That seemed to satisfy Wilson enough to lie his head down in House’s lap, with a cushion, and get comfortable watching the TV, a small smile playing about his lips. House looked down at him for a while, aching at the thought of what was going to happen - what he was utterly powerless to prevent. He brushed a lock of Wilson’s hair away from his temple, looking through him like an x-ray into the disease hiding inside that head he knew and liked so much.

If only it had been something simple. Something he could take some pills for and bitch about like everyone else with a medical problem. It wasn’t fair.

They lounged in silence for a while, taking in some trashy TV as they both processed things in their minds a little. At some point, House slipped his hand under a loosened fold of Wilson’s shirt and rested his hand on the bare skin just above his hip. It felt soothing somehow to do that, and a good test of his resolve in taking their friendship to a new level while they still could.

Wilson seemed to doze in and out of a light sleep for a while but every time he snapped back to full consciousness he turned his head to make sure House was there. Every time he saw that he was, he smiled lazily and rested his head back down to watch the television, clearly just enjoying the feeling of having someone with him for once, never quite catching the soft smile this produced in House.

Eventually, House dozed off too until the heat loss from his lap caused by the removal of the cushion and human blanket shook him awake. He found Wilson clearing away the sad remains of their abortive take-out meal and when he returned, he looked bleary eyed.

‘I should take my sleeping tablets or I’ll doze in and out all night and feel like a zombie in the morning,’ he said, coyly. ‘Unless…?’

‘Take them later,’ House said, knowing his meaning. He struggled - really struggled - to get to his feet, because his leg had been too still for too long and he didn’t want to take a Vicodin tablet now because he didn’t want his pleasantly growing arousal to fizzle out.

Wilson helped him out of his jacket, which he somehow had neglected to remove earlier, threw it across the back of the couch, and drew him away to his bedroom. They undressed each other quietly and slowly, with a certain drowsiness. Then Wilson pulled the covers back and helped House to get on the bed and lie down. He disappeared into the adjoining bathroom for a few minutes, during which time House did everything he could to stay awake, and then crawled in beside him.

He brought House back to alertness with some skin contact and kisses that made all the trepidation and doubt in the physician’s mind float away. Wilson was no longer his one constant; he was a finality. He would end and be gone and that made any arguments House might have had for keeping things strictly friendship entirely redundant. In short, they had nothing to prove; no society to conform to, no expectations to fulfil, no conditions to aspire to; only the need to cling onto each other for as long as they could now, whatever that meant.

Besides, House liked this. He liked the feeling of someone kissing his neck, his chest, his arms, his thighs - even _that_ thigh - like someone gave a damn about him. He liked that it was James Wilson, Casanova himself, delivering a signed-sealed-delivered guarantee that he wanted him more than anyone else he could have charmed into his bed.

They made love very slowly. Wilson took his time and savored everything, purposefully making House whimper with need. He took his time in preparing himself with lube and then sliding carefully down onto him until House felt like they’d melted together.

‘You really like that?’ House gasped when he was fully seated, a little awed at the sight of Wilson in such a state.

‘It initially came as a surprise, but…’

‘I know, I know. “It’s not bad”?’

Wilson smiled. ‘Precisely. Now shut up and let me concentrate.’

A certain squeeze of certain internal muscles did the trick better than his words and he chuckled at the sight of House throwing his head back and groaning. Wilson took the opportunity to capture his Adam’s apple and plant a love-bite on it. At the suspicious glare which was returned for his efforts, he shrugged and muttered something about buying House a new scarf.

House was about to say something in return but Wilson was beginning to rock and that took his breath away. His usual instinct of turning to sarcasm and wit was replaced with a more primal urge and he sat himself up, wrapped his arms around Wilson to gain leverage and rocked with him.

That strange something in the depths of his belly started to uncoil again, to blissful effect, and he barely even felt the twinges of pain being sent out by his leg every time he pushed up into Wilson or strained to kiss him. The sensations produced were still so novel - the body strong and built with unfamiliar lines, though not unyielding - he couldn’t stop himself from giving it everything he had in him. House wasn’t exactly unversed in the workings of the male body, being a doctor and all, and he knew that if he angled himself in a certain way and did some trial and error, eventually -

‘Ahhh oh god ohhh!’

\- he could really make this work extremely well. He also knew that if he managed to fumble some lube onto his hand, he would be able to do something productive for Wilson with that too. He didn’t actually think about it being the first time he’d touched another man intimately in a non-medical situation until Wilson had wrapped a hand around his and was directing him. So surreal, yet perfectly enjoyable.

If the way Wilson was clinging onto his shoulder with his free hand and riding him faster and faster was any indicator, he was hitting the right notes. Finally, the rhythm that had been tapping away at the back of his mind all day, that terrible Boléro, was replaced with a better rhythm of gasps and moans and sealed into place alongside the toe-curling pleasure.

He managed to tip Wilson over the edge first before loosing the willpower to hold back. He flew apart at the edges as his frantic desperation never to lose this man from his life exploded to the surface and, if he could have, he would have poured the tattered remains of his life into Wilson if it could have saved him.

 _“Not fair. Can’t lose you now,”_ his mind cried, silently, as he spent himself.

Wilson’s hands ruffled through his hair as he smiled and peppered the flushed and stubbly face with kisses. ‘Why did we wait so long?’ he gasped with a laugh.

‘No idea,’ House wheezed back, although he was already fumbling for his Vicodin tablets now that the high was passing.

Wilson slumped onto the mattress beside him and felt around the surface of his bedside table for his own pills and took them with a sip of the water he’d left there ready. Then he set his alarm and snuggled down into the pillows on his side of the bed.

’Night House,’ he said.

‘Night Wilson,’ the customary reply said. Then, after a few moments, House continued at a very quiet mumble, ‘I won’t run when... when…’

A hand slid under the covers and found his, delivering a gentle squeeze of acknowledgement of his promise not to flee when the illness really took hold and their lives began, inevitably, to shatter.

Then, after a few moments of peaceful silence, Wilson whispered with a sarcastic smile in his voice, ‘That much I can be sure of.’ The hand patted his good thigh and moved away.

In the darkness, House grinned like his face would split and tears he would never be able to shed stung the surface of his eyes and the darkness of the night ahead began to suffocate him.

\---

Somewhere in the misty land of half-sleeping, half-waking, House heard the alarm clock sounding out and the radio clicking into play. But it was only the most peripheral part of his brain which took note of it; the rest of him was very resolutely staying unaware. Sleep was comfortable.

Then a hand was shaking him and something was pinching his nose to deny him his breath. He came to with a start and looked at Wilson in shock.

‘Rise and shine,’ Wilson said.

House clumsily grabbed him for a kiss - because he’d be liable to hit him if he didn’t do something else first - and was vaguely amused as Wilson squirmed against him in protest.

‘We are going to have to do something about that stubble,’ Wilson said, wrinkling his nose. He tried to pull free of House’s grip on his arms and looked quite surprised when release wasn’t forthcoming. ‘Uh, I don’t know about you, but I have a job to go to.’

‘Be late,’ House growled.

Wilson didn’t look all that impressed. ‘No.’

‘Be late or I’ll announce that I screwed you to the whole clinic the moment I step through the door.’ He grinned, impishly.

One eyebrow rose at that idea and Wilson relaxed a little in his arms. He gave House a downright lascivious look and rolled over onto him under the sheets. He then began kissing downwards from his neck, over his chest, across his quivering stomach, down down down…

And before House knew it, Wilson had backed all the way to the end of the bed under cover of the covers. He then climbed right out and stood there, free, at the end of it. Wilson gave House a triumphant ‘ha!’ and went to go get his morning shower.

‘You’re a hard man, James Wilson…’ House began and immediately regretted it.

‘No, that would be you at this present moment,’ the returning comment was thrown back over his shoulder, with a chuckle, as Wilson left the room.

House stared at the ceiling, his smile at the prospect of doing this more often with Wilson giving way to his fears for the future. But he quickly squashed that down.

For now, at least, Wilson was Wilson. Maybe he wouldn’t be around for as long as House had envisioned, but frankly, he had felt for some time that he probably didn’t have too many years left to live himself, with his track record of drug abuse and pissing people off.

Hell, Thirteen could outlive the both of them.

There was a certain comfort in that idea; or at least there was to a misanthropic cripple unable to save his best friend from a fatal disease.

And so House rolled out of bed and began the process of getting ready for work, as normal. Normal was all there was to cling to now.

At least, that was what he thought, until Wilson returned, freshly washed and shaved and dressed, and kissed him by the door. House knew then, as he breathed in the scent of soap and Wilson and basked in the feeling of that moment, that their final years were going to be a horrible, desperate, painful and exciting crescendo of discords tumbling towards… a perfect ending.

Like the Boléro.

**Author's Note:**

> If you don't know Ravel's Bolero, you really should: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BV-nm2OIEzM
> 
> Also, I wrote this long before the actual ending of the show, but kinda called it with Wilson getting sick - at least a bit.


End file.
